098 The Blood Supply To The Upper Extremities (Main Arteries)

In this episode, Leslie discusses the different arteries supplying the upper extremities. These arteries include the subclavian, axillary, brachial, radial and ulnar arteries. This will also be the first episode where Leslie uses an app from 3D4Medical.com

What this allows me to do is get a three-dimensional view of the human body and all of the anatomical structures looking at the muscles. Here, I can add some muscles and I can zoom in on one muscle and get all the information about that muscle, about the origins, and the insertions, actions, innervation, blood supply, and all that fun stuff.

I can peel away some those muscles and I can get the nerves. I can look at the veins. There is a lot that I can do with this app. If you want to find out more about them, you can head on over to 3D4Medical.com.

The Arteries as they Come Off of the Aorta

In this video, what I’m basically going to be doing is looking at the blood supply to the upper extremities. We’re going to look at the main arteries that are going to the upper extremities. In order to do that, what I’m going to do is first, I’m going to remove the manubrium and the left clavicle so that, we can get a good view of the major arteries as they are coming off of the arch of the aorta.

When I look at the arch of the aorta, this is what I’m going to see. First I’m going to see that we have three major arteries coming out. On the left side, we’re going to have our left subclavian artery which is the one that I am coloring green right now. We’re going to have our left common carotid and then, on the right side, we’re going to have our brachiocephalic trunk or you can call that the innominate artery and that is then going to branch into our right common carotid and our right subclavian.

There’s one main difference that you want to pay attention to there. On the left side, the subclavian and the common carotid are coming directly out of the arch of the aorta. On the right side, we have the brachiocephalic trunk which is then branching into the right common carotid and the right subclavian artery.

That’s as it’s coming off of the arch of the aorta.

Now, we’re going to look on the right side and pay attention to the major artery that are going to the upper extremities. We mentioned the subclavian where we have the right subclavian artery.

What’s going to happen is as that artery passes different landmarks and goes into different regions, it’s going to change names.

The Axillary Region

The first landmark you want to pay attention to is the first rib. As we pass the lateral border of the first rib, it’s going to change from our subclavian artery to our axillary artery. The axillary artery is in the region of the armpit. The word axilla means armpit so that, the axillary artery is going to continue on from the lateral border of the first rib to the lower border of the muscle, teres major. I’m going to add some muscle in here for you to see exactly what I am talking about.

Right here, we see this muscle that is highlighted, that muscle is teres major. As we pass the lower border of teres major, we’re going to change from axillary artery to the brachial artery.

So far, we have our subclavian artery. Then, we have our axillary artery as we pass the lateral border of the first rib. As we pass the lower border of teres major, we are going to get our brachial artery.

The Forearm Region

I’m going to remove the muscles again because we don’t need this for now and we’re going to continue on. Just to mention really quick, I’m skipping out a bunch of branches and we’re going to get into those branches that are coming off of these major arteries in later videos. For now, let’s continue on down to go into the region of the forearms.

The brachial artery is going through the arm and that’s going to be the main blood supply for the arm muscles. Brachial refers to arm and now, we’re going into the region of the forearm. As we enter into the region of the forearm, we’re going to see that that brachial artery is going to give off a lateralbranch and a medial branch.

I’m going to zoom in here and you’ll be able to see that the lateralbranch is our radial artery and then, the medial branch is our ulnar artery. Those are the main blood supplies of the forearm. I’m going to zoom back out here.

Basically, that’s all I want to go over in this video. So, just to review, what we’ve looked at so far, we started with our subclavian artery. It’s this artery right here. And then, we changed into the region of the armpit which was our axillary artery. And then, as we went into the arm, we have our brachial artery and then, as we go into our forearm, we have our radial and ulnar arteries.

Those are the main arteries going to the upper extremities. In later videos, we’re going to break it down even further and look at the branches that are coming off of those main arteries.

That’s pretty much it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it. This once again is in partnership with 3D4Medical.com that makes this app and a number of others.

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